A blog full of bits of historical information, comments & observations, photographs (old and new), oddball ramblings and other totally random stuff.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

FIVE-DOLLAR FINDS

I admit it: I’m a flea market/antique store hound.

There’s something about prowling through a shop or wandering the aisles of a flea market that intrigues me. It’s the element of sweet surprise, I think; about the finding of something unexpected, something that absolutely speaks to me on a level I’m not quite willing to analyze – what is it, after all, that compels me to sort through the leftover objects of other lives, other times?

I have a self-imposed limit on those days: I buy things that cost no more than $5.00. – if it’s tagged at $6-10, I might try to haggle it down to $5, but that $5.00 is a firm limit!

Here are three of my favorite $5.00 items!

I found the baby head in a shop in Brunswick, Maine. She was looking straight at me from the end of a tall bookshelf; her eyes were open, penetrating, and I was so startled I jumped a foot off the floor, then burst out laughing.

I bought her on the spot.

$5.00 on the nose.

And what a nose! She’s just lovely when you look closely, even through all the cracks and imperfections. She now lives on a bookshelf in my living room (once a bibliophile, always a bibliophile!).

Some people are totally freaked out by her, others grin in delight...

The little camera came from the Rockland area. I picked it up to look at the detail work on the lens – it was heavier than I anticipated; turned out to be solid metal. The bellows don’t move, of course, but it’s intriguing. Imagine my surprise when I turned it around and found that it’s really a pencil sharpener – you insert the pencil through the bottom, and the sharpening blades are inside the box.

And then there’s this metal cage. I spied it about four years ago at a huge flea market in southern Maine – one of those places that has at least one hundred tables arranged in rows; it’s so enormous you can spend an entire afternoon walking the aisles!

I saw the cage near the front, but didn’t want to carry it around with me, so I took a chance – I left it there and went on.

It was still there when I finished, which I took as a positive sign from the Flea Goddess, so I handed over $4.50 and headed home with it.

Sometimes I wonder what I’ve done – whatever would I do with this thing? It sat outside on my back porch for a few weeks, and then I stuck the pot of ivy inside...

At last!

In the early 1800s, five families settle on the Eastern River in Pittston, Maine. Together, they build a strong and lasting agricultural neighborhood based on New England values of community and reciprocity. Both fiction and social history, The Eastern flows through the experiences and truths we share with those who have lived before us.